Cape to Cairo

Notes from the middle of the road (Zambia)

Traveling obviously has a lot to do with identity. Where we’re from, the places we go, the experiences we have and the people we meet there are big pieces in the story we tell ourselves (and others) about ourselves, and about the world. But I wonder what travel’s relationship is with art — if it may be its own sort of medium.

In writing the book about Peter Beard, I sort of essayed this idea that his famous collages and diaries and photographs are merely ephemera, and a byproduct of his real art, which was his life and how he lived it. I’m not sure PB would have even agreed, but he very definitely and deliberately built a character and a world and a narrative around himself in the same manner as would a filmmaker or playwright. And what Peter absolutely believed is that what we do defines us.

So, I wonder if the way we take our journeys, the way we move through the world, and the reasons why we do so, can possibly make our travels something more than just a trip? If we plan a pilgrimage with the same sort of intention and structuring as we would a novel, say, if we set about costuming it and outfitting it the way we would a movie (a very very small movie), if we invest the adventure with the fullness of our identity and all the we know and can be at the moment, and if we hope to make out of the experience something new to see, a new story to tell, can travel itself be something more? Maybe even something along the lines of an artform?

I wrote a piece for T+L a while back about the ways in which we build narratives around our adventures — whether in pilgrimage to a real or fictional place, to commune with the characters (real or otherwise) that inhabit our imaginations. And that’s, I think, the same impulse that makes me want to tell stories, take pictures, make movies etc (for that same T+L piece I used the cold war capitals of my favorite espionage stories to illustrate the point, and made the pictures as if they were still frames from a spy movie that will never exist — and of course costumed myself in all the chocolate and camel suede and corduroy that movie would’ve employed). Not that I’m saying anything like this trip I’m on is a work of art, lol. But I want to keep pushing this idea to see where it can go. Like, what if Stan Douglas, say, made a series around a particular journey, for example. There is something conceptual and even performative about the trips we take, a narrative we build with the itinerary and the way we organize the memories, and even a kind of character we play en route. So what if we took it further? I’m curious to know where that goes. But then maybe, probably, I am just a novelist-and filmmaker manqué projecting on my present day job the dreams of my youth, ha.

As I write this, I am nearing the midpoint on my own trip, through nearly a dozen countries over the course of almost three months, from Cape Town to Cairo. A trip that, in my mind, has historically represented a mode of completist travel undertaken as a means toward achievement. A journey toward accomplishment. For science, they might’ve said back when. For fame and fortune, if we think of that generation emboldened by the Royal Geographical Society, say, or by the Victorian era newspapers of their time, who serialized their exploits and made them the most famous people alive. Travelers who were after the personal bag but also effectively scouting for empire.  

I grew up reading the European travelers one generation on down from those RGS guys — the Wilfred Thesigers, the Freya Starks, the Patrick Leigh Fermors, even the Agatha Christies — and thought them to be the most glamorous people who had ever lived. Because of their apparent worldliness, I guess. Because they seemed to live with a purpose and a historical significance few others did. And because, god, can you imagine their dinner party stories?

Maybe I was predisposed, then, to be fascinated by the late artist and Africa-fanatic Peter Beard. And in my reading and research on the book about Peter, I went back to the stories of those travelers and explorers I grew up admiring (as Peter did), and I began to think that so much of the way we travel now has been informed by the way they saw and moved through the world. To see travel as acquisitive, extractive, for one. Going on the road for a souvenir, say, be it a material object or a story, a sense of self as being enriched, as the travel pamphlet cliche likes to encourage us. I began to think that this era of adventurer, during what is sometimes now called the golden age of travel, carved such deep grooves in our cultural consciousness that we are still sort of following it today.

Coincidentally, I recently turned a friend on to Dan Eldon, and in so doing remembered again that Eldon was the real entry point for me, to a fascination with Africa, to a romance for a vibrant well-documented adventure (his journals of his time traveling around the continent were released under the title, The Journey is the Destination, and I’ve always thought of him as having coined the phrase but that could be some Mandela effect at work), and even to Peter Beard. In thinking about Eldon, about my youthful zeal for the kind of life he documented, and for travel as a kind of grand opus, I realized that maybe we never really do outgrow our adolescence, or at least or the dreams of our adolescent selves.

Because here I am, sort of following at least the idea that I had of Eldon, of Fermor, of even Agatha Christie (at least in the amount of luggage I’m carrying with me), as a way (I tell myself) to engage with the romantic image of the traveler I grew up admiring, and to think about the way that those travelers’ patterns and behaviors and tastes have shaped our journeys today. And also maybe to unwind the way we/I think of those things. I’ll let you know how it goes.

As I do so, I will be publishing some videos and stories with Esquire (the first couple are up now), so that you can follow along. I am also writing/photographing a few features here and there, but those will of course be many moons in the making, and won’t really fit a bunch of the stuff that I am thinking about while on the road, so I am going to try to add some more diaristic stuff here, and of course here, throughout.

Which reminds me, I’ve had features in the last two issues of Travel + Leisure, both of which I am overly proud of, on returning to Vietnam 15 years after I moved there, and on my beloved Tangier. As ever, wish you were here, etc.